Many advances have occurred in the last decade in information technology. Today, cell phones, everyday appliances, transportation devices, clothing, jewelry, etc. have network, storage, and processing capabilities. A decade or so ago, it was only computers that could perform such feats. Recently, the appliances themselves are becoming irrelevant as the processing to perform functions and the storage used by the processing has moved to cloud-based computing.
Still with the future of global cloud computing there needs to be a mechanism to securely share messages that companies, employees and others can subscribe to. There needs to be the ability to share across the enterprise boundary and between companies. The ability to share messages to all necessary parties needs to be performed in a fashion where security is inherit within all aspects and is always being maintained. Unfortunately, such technology does not exist in the industry.
Consider the following situation to illustrate the deficiency in the industry with respect to secure messaging, when one company (X) hires a contract employee (ACME) to work on-site at X. The contract employee is working on-site to X and is using X resources to accomplish his/her assignment. X creates a virtual machine (VM) from their private cloud for the contractor. The contract employee is monitored for all activities on the VM. This includes Uniform Resource Locator (URL) links accessed; what is installed on the VM; and everything that occurs with this VM. All of the events that are related to this need to be shared with both X and ACME. X wants to make sure the contract employee is doing everything he/she should be, but ACME also wants to check all of this information. Additionally if X does not provide software licenses for the contract employee, then ACME needs to provide this. There needs to be some mechanism to share events and messages not only with X but also with ACME.
Another example problem to consider is that X hires Digital (Software as a Service (SaaS) to provide some cloud service applications. Digital SaaS needs to monitor the servers and applications running the SaaS application. All events from these services are collected. Digital SaaS has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with X. X wants to also monitor and be notified of all events and important messages from this same set of services provided by Digital SaaS. There needs to be a secure mechanism to share all events from Digital SaaS to X.
Unfortunately, with the present technology of the industry the above-presented situations are not efficiently capable of being handled.